CHAPTER XXVII

“She was beautiful, and therefore to be wooed: She was a woman, and therefore to be won.”

GLADYS went into the garden, where it was coolest and shadiest, and sat, a lovely and pathetic figure, leaning, it is true, against a cushion with her listless hands in her lap.

So Captain Hurstly found her. She had written the little heart-broken note, and she rose to meet him with quivering lips.

“Oh, Jack, Jack!” she murmured—in an abandonment of grief Christian names fall so naturally, and it sounded very sweet to Jack—“how good of you to come!”

“Good of me?”—he held both her hands; she had given them to him unconsciously—“I think it was awfully sweet of you to see me—I’m so sorry, dear—so sorry!” The tears rolled down her cheeks. She looked very pretty when she cried, and it was very difficult not to kiss her.

“Mary was everything I had in the world,” she said withdrawing her hands with a swift blush, and sinking back on the cushions again—“mother, sister, friend. And Tom—Tom has been so brutal to me Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do!”

“Tom brutal to you?”

“Yes! he hates me. I’m sure I don’t know why. Perhaps he feels now he might have done more for Mary. She told me often how terribly lonely she was before I came to her. We are to go back to England next week, and I know too well what that means!”

“What does it mean?” he asked looking at her long and carefully, the white dress that fell away from the little fair throat, the pathetic quiver of the dainty mouth, the hopeless, hunted look in the big dark eyes.

“Oh, I can’t tell you!” she cried with a sudden gasp. “Don’t—don’t ask me!”

“I must know,” he said firmly; “tell me, please.” The color swept over her cheeks, her eyes faltered and fell before his, her hands trembled in her lap.

“Tom wants me to marry,” she said at last, “a man I can never—love.” She covered her face with her hands. “Go away!” she cried piteously. “Isn’t it hard enough already without making me tell—you!” She gasped the word containing her passionate heart. She was in earnest now, that was why she hid her face; she knew that she would not be so pretty.

The word that fell in the hot still morning lived ever afterwards in Jack’s mind with the heavy scent of tropical flowers, the restless quiver of the air, and the sharp metallic stroke of a coppersmith’s beak near by. She was unhappy, and pretty, and clinging—and she loved him. Had he any right to make her love him so, and then leave her to a bitter and miserable marriage? So pity spoke, and the beauty of the girl’s lithe form, the curl of hair just escaping the uplifted hand, the delicate scent she used, the whole scene with its setting of the old hot Indian garden spoke to passion. And when pity and passion speak at the same moment, reason, sense, and self-control fade fast away. He took her hands from her face; she looked at him as a startled child would look; he felt the beating of her heart; he drew her closer to him, and she made no resistance.

“Gladys, Gladys, will you be happy with _me_, darling?” he asked her.

“Oh, Jack!” she cried, “you never even asked me—if I loved you!”

An hour later, radiant, triumphant, cruel, Gladys stood before Tom Huntly.

“I am not going back to England with you,” she said. “I am going to marry Jack Hurstly. I shall stay with Mrs. Collins till the wedding, and come home with Jack, for good.” Tom Huntly looked at her, alive and young! and upstairs lay the body of his wife, and the girl could be so happy!

“Are you quite heartless?” he asked wearily. The insolence of her joy turned to weak self-pity, and she began to cry again.

“Oh, poor, poor Mary!” she sobbed. “She _so_ wanted to help me choose my trousseau!” Tom left the room, shutting the door after him.

Jack went back to his quarters. He wondered why the scent she wore seemed so familiar. He remembered at last that Edith le Mentier had used it too, and he remembered at the same time with equal irrelevancy that Muriel never used scent.

That evening he had a long talk with Tom Huntly. His friendship with Mary had been a deep and real one, and he thought Gladys must have been mistaken about Tom’s brutality. He was not that sort of man; and he thought Tom was equally mistaken when he said rather doubtfully, “I hope you will be happy with Gladys; she’s not half up to the form of that other girl of yours.”

Any reference to Muriel was peculiarly irritating to him just now.

It also seemed that people who knew Gladys very well did not appreciate her so deeply as people who knew her slightly—a trait which is certainly a trifle unfortunate in a man’s future wife. But he had burned his boats, and he remembered how pretty she was, and tried to think it very natural that the day after his engagement he should find his _fiancée_ playing love-songs on the piano to her very distant connection, Jim Musgrave.